The Best Advice Ever Given For Entrepreneurs With Tracy Hazzard From The On The Shelf Podcast With Timothy Bush

There is a lot of wisdom to be shared by those who have been in the trenches and failed their way forward to where they are now, but if the universe conspired to allow them only one piece of advice, what would make the most impact to the budding entrepreneur? Tracy Hazzard counts herself in as one of the panelists who share their take on this question in this Flash Topic discussion at Timothy Bush’s On the Shelf Podcast. For her part, Tracy emphasizes the need to obtain market proof before taking major risks, not just to prove that people like your product, service or idea, but to make sure that they will buy it. Follow the whole discussion as Tracy and her co-panelists try to home in to the single most important and all-encompassing entrepreneurial advice of all. 

Listen to the podcast here

Tracy, what do you think? You got this person in front of you and they’re wanting to know what your one thing is.

I’m tossing around too that’s why I’ve been a little quiet here. I wish I could just take them and go, “Please don’t spend your money yet.” Stop them and that is that you need market proof first. It is the number one reason why my client’s products and products are more successful than others. It’s the number one thing that we do. We make sure that it’s not that people like our products, but they will buy our product, our idea, our thing, or whatever it might be. We’re checking whether or not someone is going to plunk down money for that. We don’t always go all out in an invention and do it. We check it in small ways and we’re continually saying, “If we added this, would this be a value to you? If we added that, would this be a value to you?” We give images and 3D printings and do whatever we can to not spend that money and go all in until we’re sure that there’s value in it.

Best Advice For Entrepreneurs: Just because you’re creative doesn’t mean you have to create everything yourself from scratch. Get some real expert help.

We so often get into this world where you go, “My mom and everyone else loves my product. They love my idea,” but that doesn’t matter in the scope of commerce. If you’re going to risk everything and a lot of people do, I want you to make sure you have market proof first. It’s the thing I lectured the most on. It’s my number one piece of advice. A close second to that is to stop trying to do it all yourself. Get some real expert help. Because you’re creative, because you’re adventurous and because you have the mindset of being able to develop something, you think that everything is negotiable. Everything is inventible, everything should be able to be done by you and the reality is there’s a lot of landmines. There’s a lot of insider information. Get some experts in your corner and listening to them and being curious about what they can do, all of those things that everyone just suggested here, that’s the most critical items I see. Those being successful are getting input from outside of themselves.

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There are nine pieces of advice here… If you had to pick one out of there, what would you pick?

Best Advice For Entrepreneurs: When you’ve planned and thought things through, you are more prepared and able to shift when things don’t go right.

I’m going to go with you, Tim. I just saw The Untouchables so I kept thinking, “What are you prepared to do?” That’s going on in my head because if you’re prepared to be uncomfortable, if you’re prepared to be curious, if you’re going to go all in, how deep are you prepared to do? That covers everything. You’re going to have to do so many things you never imagined you were going to do. You’re going to have to be someone you didn’t know you could be. It covers all of that.

Watch the episode here:

On The Shelf 
Timothy Bush